By Derk Richardson

A GOOD FENCE

might make a good neighbor in rural New England, but it just blocks your view when you put it around a musician's creative prerogatives. For years the relatively small audience familiar with pianist Marilyn Crispell's work cordoned her off in the territory of the post-'60s jazz avant-garde. Support for this corralling could be found in her often thunderous keyboard technique, which erupted with soulful passion in the manner of her initial jazz inspiration, John Coltrane, and in her fractured harmonies and shattered melodies, which brought to mind another avowed influence, Cecil Taylor. Crispell's collaborations – with bassists Reggie Workman and Barry Guy, drummers Gerry Hemmingway, Hamid Drake, and Eddie Prevost, saxophonists Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, and Joseph Jarman – and decade-long tenure in the Anthony Braxton Quartet further substantiated her "outside" identification.

Those who have been introduced to Crispell's music in the past five years, however, through her two ECM recordings with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian – 1997's Nothing Ever Was, Anyway. Music of Annette Peacock and last year's Amaryllis – likely have a completely different impression of the Philadelphia native. They are apt to assign her to the more pastoral terrain of such explicitly lyrical pianists as Bill Evans and Paul Bley. Meditative in temperament, spacious in texture, and crystalline in articulation, these CDs reveal a seemingly softer and more reflective side to Crispell's sensibility.

Now Crispell finds herself with two audiences, each bringing its own set of expectations to its listening. "Many people still associate me with the whole so-called free jazz scene," Crispell says in a recent phone conversation from her home in Woodstock, N.Y. "They just tend to think, 'Ah, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton' and expect me to do that. Others think I'm going to do the kind of stuff that's on Amaryllis." Even jazz critics who should know better have diagnosed Crispell as a split personality. "One writer said, 'She has found her inner Keith Jarrett,' " Crispell says. "It's as if there is some sort of schizophrenic break, and there isn't."

Those who conclude that Crispell has recently undergone some sort of conversion to prettiness should listen more closely for the continuities in her playing. They might turn to the 1995 Music and Arts CDs that capture her sensitive performances of Annette Peacock's "Gesture Without Plot" and Bill Evans's "Time Remembered" at solo piano concerts in Woodstock and at Yoshi's in Oakland. They could also go back and appreciate the tunefulness abounding in the 1994 Swedish recording In the Air (Alice Musik), with bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Raymond Strid, or dig deeper into the catalog and find the lushly romantic passages of "Dear Lord" and "After the Rain" in the seminal 1987 London solo-concert recording released on Leo in 1993 as For Coltrane. "Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, those influences were there from the beginning," Crispell says. "But people were overwhelmed by the other stuff and didn't hear it."

Similarly, anyone who thinks the 54-year-old pianist has forsaken aggressive rhythms, dense chord clusters, and jarring dissonance needs to track down the two recordings she did with upstate New York electric guitarist Tisziji Munoz in 2000. On Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death and Auspicious Healing! (both on Munoz's own Anami Music label), Crispell makes the keyboard roar as wild man Munoz puts his solos, infused with Coltrane-like fierce spirituality, into interstellar overdrive. On Breaking the Wheel the rhythm section of bassist Don Pate and former Trane drummer Rashied Ali finds itself alternately driving the momentum from below and frantically keeping up with the ferocious pace set by Munoz and Crispell. "It felt like going home," the pianist says of playing with Munoz, "because he comes right out of that Coltrane A Love Supreme thing too."

"It's all definitely part of who I am," she explains. "It's an evolving process, and the process is not something you can pin down. Categories don't account for process. People don't seem to look at the artist; they look at the product or the category. They don't trust that this is a person who has a certain talent or ability to express something and just listen to what they're saying and allow that it might not be the same tomorrow as it is today or was yesterday. That's understandable but unfortunate. I guess the world is too overwhelming to just be open and let it all come in."

When Crispell opens the concert portion of SFJAZZ Spring Season, performing with Peacock and Motian at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, she will be part of the weeklong program "Jazz Women," designed to honor Women's History Month, and perhaps to make amends for the overwhelming male dominance in previous Spring Season bookings.

The irony of finding herself fenced into yet another category is not lost on Crispell. "People used to tell me I played like a man," she says. "And I considered it a compliment, because I think what they were trying to say was, 'You're strong, you play with conviction' and 'We thought you were going to sit down at the piano and play some mousy little thing, and you attacked the piano, wow!' But those are all just silly stereotypes. Women have children. I guess you have to be pretty damn strong to do that. I don't believe in women's music and men's music. We all have masculine and feminine energy in us."

"It's a positive thing to focus on people who maybe haven't received the attention they should," she allows. But, she adds, "for most of my career I've avoided being involved in women-in-jazz types of things because that wasn't the way I wanted to be thought of. I wanted to be thought of just as a musician, regardless of whether I was a woman or a man." And she picks her playing partners not according to gender, but rather based on "who can play the music I want to express at any given time."

In Peacock and Motian she has found sympathetic sensibilities cultivated through years of playing with Evans, Bley, and Jarrett, among others. Motian coaxes an amazing variety of colors from the skins and cymbals, and Peacock, a practicing Zen Buddhist, brings an intensely analytical temperament to the trio, Crispell says. "Gary doesn't think so much about what he's going to do as what would sound good with that music at that moment." What she calls the "really intuitive, deep listening thing going on" in the trio, which results in something akin to intimate chamber music, also reflects certain patterns in Crispell's personal life. Her work with Braxton gave her an awareness of "composition and structure within improvisation"; a Tibetan Buddhist practice opened her to "the space that you allow yourself when you stop thinking for a few minutes." Living in the country has also affected her, she says, and "maybe it's just that I'm getting older."

Whatever the combination of forces behind it, Crispell has attained an enviable state of clarity and equanimity about her career. Where she was almost hyperactively prolific during her 40s – on my shelf I found 14 Crispell CDs recorded or released between 1992 and 1996 – she is taking a more leisurely approach to documenting her work these days. "I'll record again when I'm ready to say something," she says. When she does, it will certainly be on her own artistic terms.

"I'm feeling more open about expressing everything that I feel and not holding things back or playing what I think I should play in order to satisfy anyone's preconceptions, including my own," she adds. "I just don't want to be held back by any of that. I really want to explore what I want to say, when I feel like saying it. I have absolute faith that that's going to be accepted, because I've always thought that if you do something with conviction and love, it will get across."